Are you prepared for the Metaverse?

Derrick Reimer a self-proclaimed indie hacker and bootstrapper set out to build an alternative to Slack himself, called Level. A year later, despite launching the product, he made the tough decision to walk away from the product. This in-depth retrospective provides a ton of lessons throughout his journey, particularly his revelation when discovering his previous validation strategy provided him with the wrong signals of intent. i.e. What people say they want isn’t what they actually do in reality. 12-min read

🎁 Bonus Read: Level manifesto - great strategy to validate the problem and test if it resonates with people by collecting their email addresses.

In this article, Matthew Ball discusses what the metaverse is, why it’s important, some of the current trends, and what we might expect for metaverse development in the future. If you have seen ‘Ready Player One’ you might already have an idea of what the Metaverse means, but that seems like the distant future until we can reach a world where reality and augmented reality are blended together, however, we are closer than you might think. It’s certainly a mind-bending prediction of the future with no popular consensus but I’m fascinated to see where this takes us. 38-min read

🎁 Bonus Read: A beginner’s guide to NFTs & The Metaverse by Dan Murray-Serter

We’re seeing a new breed of individual emerge. Individuals who are able to build infinitely scalable businesses attached to their own name, with global reach and without the infrastructure normally associated with doing so. In this post Tom Osman explores some great examples of successful online solo makers and creators taking advantage of the creator economy in what is referred to by some as web 3.0. This quote gets me excited - “What we’re seeing now, is just a taste. There are billions more people about to arrive online.” 4-min read

⭐️ Fun fact: Tom just recently sold an NFT of a rock for $1.3m. You can read more about it here and here.

Yup, you guessed it - a competitive sports league for no-code software development. I can’t believe this has only recently popped on my radar. As a non-techie, watching developers live on Twitch or YouTube just didn’t do it for me, but this i could get into. Yes, it’s slightly cringing but once you get over that it’s pretty fun to watch and learn from some of the best no code makers challenging each other.

Ever been lost trying to understand NFTs, DAU, CAC, Burn? How do we make it frictionless for someone to understand startup terminology without boring the hell out of them? Enter Startup Concepts: Startup terms are simplified in a comic book format - even I can wrap my head around these. With first principle insights, real-world examples and resources to dive deeper; it doesn’t get easier than this to understand a concept.

Ever thought of using startup money judiciously, and on important things like a Patagonia vest or a pair of All Birds? Here’s an opportunity for you. Pick a startup and burn their runway using a variety of well-known tech bro items. I personally managed to spend Figma’s $200 million on thousands of Airpods, Macbook Pro’s, CryptoPunks and Tesla’s!

More and more makers and creators are applying the model of “build in public” and sharing their journey building products and businesses for others to follow and interact with. It is becoming increasingly important to build an engaged audience for your ideas on the internet and I’m grateful to have seen the power of building in public first hand. Marc Köhlbrugge created this handy tool to find others who are building in public.

🎁 Bonus Read: Ritika wrote a fascinating piece about her experience building in public here.

The amount of new products being created with Notion is staggering. The swiss army knife of productivity software continues to surprise me with its versatility, not to mention the creativity from the makers behind these Notion products. A great example of this is Ev Chapman’s Block Base - which allows you to forward and organise important emails via Notion - capture invoices, client emails, newsletters receipts, and more. I’m personally considering this as a personal repo to store and organise my newsletters.

Andres & Adler recently launched - KnowledgeOS, the Marie Kondo for your favourite browser. If you’re like me and struggle to declutter your browser tabs let KnowledgeOS save your tabs so you can close them and access them later. I can also access all my most used applications like Notion, Jira, Gdrive, Figma, Airtable etc from their native dock saving me going back and forth between tabs. And wait, it gets better… you can use their Superhuman-like command/search bar that can be opened over any tab.